The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is an art song masquerading as a folk song. It was written by James Miller for Peggy Seeger, daughter of modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Pete Seeger’s half sister.
Miller was born in Salford, the “Dirty Old Town” of which he later wrote—a song that, sometime later, I helped cheerfully butcher of all of the carelessly accumulated sentimentalities that I doubt he ever intended.
The Pogues, like The Dubliners before them, took care of that, and I was in the producer’s chair as a witness.
James Miller had been a member of the Red Megaphones troupe. He had been married twice, first to the great theater director Joan Littlewood and then to Jean Newlove, before his musical partnership and marriage to Peggy. He had been of interest to MI5 and the Special Branch for his songs, and his communist allegiances had seen him banished from the BBC airwaves.
By 1969, he was a grand old man, as it comes to anyone who does not entirely disgrace himself. He sat under the assumed name of Ewan McColl on a straight-backed chair in a church crypt beneath the Hanging Lamp that gave the club its name. He was supporting his head on the crutch of his palm as if it were too weary to support itself.
The first time ever he saw my face, Ewan McColl promptly fell asleep. I was not yet fifteen years old. I was a floor singer, stumbling through my first public performance with an out-of-tune guitar. The song was the first that I had written. It was called “Winter” and in the cheery key of E minor.
The first time I looked up, I saw the star of the evening in repose.
I can’t recall if my hands continued to plough through the simple chord progression, but the slumbering firebrand did little for my confidence.
So it was, for those first tentative occasions, that I ventured before an indifferent crowd. The church crypt was a good place to fail quietly.
I saw a lot of different singers and musicians in that vault. The one that I most wanted to hear was the Welsh ragtime guitar wizard John James. Draught Porridge featured Elton John’s future guitar player Davey Johnstone, who provided accompaniment for the rousing vocals and tall tales of the Kerryman Noel Murphy. Somebody once told me that Murphy later accidentally swallowed broken glass, but he was so tough that he lived to sing again.
Then there was the dastardly brain behind Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield, who was a prodigious teenager then, playing guitar for his sister Sally in the duo called The Sallyangie, who performed songs with titles such as “Love in Ice Crystals.”
I had my own problems with attempted poetics but needed to achieve rather more fluency in music if I was ever going to venture into the spotlight to sing again.
I had already had a Spanish guitar.
• • •
IN 1961, my father had driven us to the Iberian Peninsula for his two-week annual holiday when the Joe Loss Orchestra was neither in residence at the Hammersmith Palais nor touring the country. That this break fell outside the weeks of the school summer holidays made it seem all the more of a liberty for a schoolboy.
Cheap package holidays and charter flights were just starting up, but my parents preferred to make the journey by road. We ferried to Boulogne-sur-Mer, from where Napoleon had once plotted his invasion of England. Armed only with maps from the Automobile Association, we headed for the Spanish border.
The route map presented each ten- to twenty-mile stretch in a long slim volume. Nothing at all apparently existed on either side of the path. If a wrong turn was taken, the correct route might only be found again by unfolding the broad map of provincial France and cross-referencing, all the time rolling on in the wrong direction.
We saw a lot of France this way.
The aim was always to drive the Hillman Minx as far south as possible on the first day, in the belief that accommodations closer to Paris were too expensive.
Car journeys with my parents are some of my fondest family memories. We were headed somewhere new or exciting together. We sat parked in the rain, drinking red soup from a thermos together. We invented games to pass the hours in the tight interior. Together.
We would eventually spend the night in some sinister hotel approaching Limoges, a name that sounded like something your auntie might serve up for tea or an ailment for which ointment was required.
Food would be begrudgingly provided by our surly hosts, who were unimpressed with my father’s schoolboy French. To a child, it was curious that meat and vegetables arrived on separate plates and that water came from a bottle.
A cage elevator lurched ominously between floors on the way to my own dingy bedroom. Later, I would dream of lovers being walled up in such a room after seeing a television mystery play that proposed this fate. The morning couldn’t come soon enough.
The road now opened up to the southern light, the town names having rhythm and beauty: Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne, and Perpignan. Soon we were on a frightening mountain pass through the Pyrenees and on an even narrower, more precarious ledge to the small Catalonian town that was our destination.
We didn’t eat Portuguese sardines or South African oranges in our household, so I have reflected in the years since that it was strange that my parents chose to holiday in an authoritarian country with its dark history of fascist repression and political murder, but my father liked the language, and I later discovered that he was also involved with a Spanish woman at this time.
It was not as if I were entirely shielded from the more public realities. I was told that my Kodak Brownie was never to be trained on any member of the Guardia Civil and their strange, shiny tricorn hats and submachine guns.
However, in every other respect, our welcome was unconditional. Crones plucked at my cheek and rattled away in words that I could neither separate nor understand, but my Dad’s Spanish was good, so there was an immediate ease.
The town of Tossa de Mar had twelfth-century castle fortifications that looked down on the narrow streets of terra-cotta–tiled buildings, and a cove that fell away sharply into deeper water. There were not yet any tall buildings or high-rise hotels ringing the town. For a kid, it was like something out of a storybook.
Holiday memories are always fragmentary: the sky as seen on a certain day through a viewfinder; the taste of seawater swallowed by accident; a man bearing an octopus up the beach, having impaled it with a speargun; the aroma of Piz Buin tanning lotion and Spanish tobacco, my Irish complexion turning tight and pink, then angry red, while German sunbathers fried themselves in oil until they resembled leather
Being June, the Feast of Corpus Christi approached. Old women picked petals from flowers and arranged them in elaborate patterns that were stenciled in chalk on certain streets. The work would be completed on the eve of the holiday and utterly destroyed in minutes, with the flowers being trampled underfoot. The heads of onlookers were bowed as large plaster statues were hoisted onto shoulders and embroidered banners unfurled. A silver monstrance was borne through the town, the pious genuflecting dramatically at the sight of the host, in the wake of a procession of golden-threaded silk and incense.
The other essential ceremony took place in Barcelona. We made a weekend visit to the Plaza de Toros Monumental. Trumpets announced the entrance of the ancient parade, the columns increasing in splendor until the star matador arrived in his ornate suit of lights.
I had faithfully learned the order of events and the name of each participant in the ritual from a little book about bullfighting that I’d been given. I knew that the toreros waved their broad pink and gold capes across the path of the bull in testing verónicas, in memory of Saint Veronica wiping the face of Christ on the way to Calvary, and I think it all got mixed up in my mind with illustrations of Holy Week in a children’s prayer book. There were leaping banderilleros with their antagonizing darts, and the picadors lancing the bull from the saddle of a padded and blindfolded horse until a dark, wet patch of blood appeared across the back of the bull, and I don’t doubt I was supposed to think of one of the Roman soldiers piercing His side with a spear. Finally, the preening matador came to dispatch the wearied beast, but not before making several indisputably brave but taunting passes of the red muletas that disguised the blade. The odds seemed well in his favor, even though an earlier, less skilled colleague had been caught by a horn and flung like a limp doll.
From our high vantage point, the reality of the scene did not come home until the sword was plunged into the spinal cord of the bull and it slumped to its knees, slobbering and snorting before it expired. The dispatch had been quick and mercifully clean. Cheers erupted, the ears of the bull were cut off as a trophy, and bows were taken as the carcass was dragged away by a team of mules, leaving the blood to soak into the sand.
I don’t believe that we stayed for another kill. Perhaps I looked sickened by the brutality at the center of the spectacle, the reality of death.
The bars were not closed to children, and my evening hours were longer than back home. Jolted awake by Coca-Cola, I witnessed the blur of dancers’ hammered heels, heard the strum and a slap of a palm across a gut-string guitar, and the hoarse cry of raw, open-throated flamenco singers up from the south. These were not the pretty, ruffled figurines, dolls, or poster images but narrow, whiplike men and women of fierce expression, their hair cinched back tight, swishing their skirts back and forth as they advanced across the tiny raised stage. If they were only there to satisfy tourist expectations, it didn’t matter. It was something that you never saw in the passionless light entertainment of the BBC. Neither did it matter that the dancers were nearly as far from home as we were.
• • •
TWO SOUVENIRS were bought and brought home from that holiday.
The first was a model of the bullring mounted on a sheet of sandpaper, complete with cardboard terraces and screens behind which the tormentors sheltered. There were painted model figures of every participant in the pageant. There was even a splash of bloodred paint on the yoke of the bull where a plume of darts had pierced him. I added a handful of stolen sand from the beach by sprinkling it across the arena floor.
The other memento was a small-scale Spanish guitar. It remained untouched in the corner of my bedroom in a soft plastic case for all the years of my childhood. I picked it up when I was about thirteen years old. I put it down again once I reached the impossible chord of F. Eventually my curiosity about one particular song overcame me.
It was now 1969. Lads were passing around diagrams of chords as if they were girlie pictures: Make this shape with your fingers and song comes out. The song itself was no three-chord trick. It was pretty complex, old before its time, even world-weary. It was Peter Green’s “Man of the World.” Earlier that year, I had slow-danced with this pretty girl to Fleetwood Mac’s number-one instrumental hit, “Albatross,” hardly a very romantic title. We were on the deck of a converted troopship somewhere near Valletta.
My Dad and her father and a couple of hundred other kids’ parents had paid the astronomical fee of £55 to send their children on an educational cruise around the Mediterranean. The accommodations had all the comforts that “converted troopship” implies, but it seemed a great adventure until the ship hit a Force Nine in the Bay of Biscay, decimating the faculty and the student body alike with seasickness.
The order of curriculum never really recovered. We stopped in Gibraltar and spent pennies on postcards home, while local men jeered and whistled at the immodest but fashionable hemlines of the English schoolgirls.
Now a rope of colored lights was illuminating the dance floor. Most times, I would have remained pressed to the wall at the edge of the action, while others danced to a Tamla or a Rock Steady record. But this was not someone’s front room with chairs pushed back; we were all at sea and the rules were different.
The courage that would have failed me had I known I must face a girl in school the next day was suddenly located. She was from another district. We would be ships in the night. I asked her to dance. She reluctantly agreed, clearly indicating I was not her ideal prince.
My hand hovered close to her shoulder, barely daring to touch it, but near enough to feel the warmth of her skin through the material. The very fingertips of my other hand grazed the small of her back as I guided us out of the path of more entranced lovers, occasionally being separated by chaperones when they pressed a little too close. The girl’s hands rested limply on my shoulders. So indifferent was her touch that I knew we would not be connected once the record ended.
The hypnotic, muffled drums of Mick Fleetwood’s pulse and Peter Green’s rounded, rolled-off tone could not extend long enough. Of course, in those days, I didn’t break records down to the component parts other than to sing along with the vocal line, the guitar solo, or a horn refrain.
Once those diagrams of chords were handed around and I pressed my feeble fingers to the fretboard and some semblance of music came out, everything began to change. “Man of the World” turned on the suspension of a D chord that would enter many of my songs in the coming years. My desire—to play the song and that which was expressed in someone else’s lyrics—drove me on past my frustrations at failing to do it well. I gathered a fair few chords in the attempt, far more than I needed to play simpler songs that I had thought closed to me. I never went much for campfire tunes.
Suddenly I realized that I could play “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by Lennon and McCartney and Lennon’s “I’m a Loser.” I bought cheap beginner’s songbooks that offered simplified chords that were satisfying for a while, until I became fluent enough with the chord changes and my ear began to find these harmonic simplifications wanting. I went to the sheet music racks and snuck a look at diagrams of major sevenths, minor sixths, and even diminished chords that were to be found in some of the more expensive complete musical editions of The Beatles’ songs. I ran home and scribbled those shapes down from memory and found them on the guitar. The missing parts of the harmony fell into place.
Still, there were songs that I could never imagine replicating, songs that must have taken an entire orchestra to play—tight, swinging, finger-snapping songs on the pale brown Tamla label.
One Friday evening, local hero Dusty Springfield had acted as the host of a special edition of the required weekend viewing, Ready Steady Go!, dedicated to what is now called “the Motown Sound.” To us it was always “Tamla.”
Thinking back, all of the acts were probably lip-synching, but next to the graceless, self-conscious awkwardness of most English acts, the Motown performers were astonishing in their dress sense, choreography, and the way they delivered their songs.
From then on, I bought everything on that label that I could afford. Those records must have been beyond mere mortals. Even though my father brought home The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” to learn, I could never imagine myself playing the songs on one guitar. Levi Stubbs sounded as if he were of the earth, or possibly hewn from rock, but the edge of desperation in his voice was beyond ordinary experience.
What kind of “Bernadette” drove him to such despair? Probably not a little Irish girl with a hair slide, on whose knee I foolishly rested my hand during a date to the cinema to see something inane like a rerun of That Darn Cat!
Marvin Gaye surely never had these problems. I couldn’t connect what I was doing in my bedroom on a guitar with a record like “You Ain’t Livin’ Till You’re Lovin’.” I could not decode that arrangement any more than I could sing in such a supernatural fashion.
All you could do was stand back in wonder, wondering when life would ever start.
This was not true of Peter Green.
Though he was a guitar player of soul and nuance far beyond both that of his flashier contemporaries and certainly my novice abilities, the humanity of his singing was modest and intimate in a way that felt like he was among us, not above us. His rendition of “Need Your Love So Bad,” with its superb short opening solo that was the only guitar break I ever aspired to memorize, was my first acquaintance with the orchestrated blues of Little Willie John, an idiom most gloriously explored by Bobby “Blue” Bland.
That was all up ahead and mattered less at the time than the intense but ill-focused wish for something more than careless fumblings in the dark.
For more than a year, I had been taken with the irrational notion that I would one day marry a different, unattainable Irish immigrant girl called Mary. The graceful shape to her leg transfixed me as she touched down. Her vivid eyes seemed confident and self-possessed, when perhaps they were simply wary of her new surroundings.
Then there was her voice, made of confidentiality and a catch of laughter that I heard in the hall or from just a short distance away. Overheard, never speaking to me directly. I knew not how to approach her or address her. How could I begin to explain?
So, I went on with my studies and my struggle to master a fistful of chords, never dreaming I would sing to anyone who knew my name.
The payoff of “Man of the World” was not the slightly self-conscious pose of the title but a dreamy, melancholy musical phrase. It laid out the impossibility of happiness in the line “And how I wish I was in love.”
And how I wished she was . . . with me.
On July 21, I was on my way to play table tennis in a basement youth club and to discuss the moon landing the previous night. I walked into the Lord Nelson pub, two hundred yards from my old primary school gates and the parish church, where I had poured wine over the priest’s fingers.
I looked the landlord in the eye and ordered a pint of beer, my tears and grief to smother. He must have known I was not yet fifteen but asked what variety.
“Guinness,” I replied, deepening my voice to a knowing octave. “In a straight glass.”